"The Little King": Otto Soglow's cartoon monarch gets the royal treatment

The Little King, 1946

 

The Little King would be surprised at the size of the new book dedicated to his simple cartoon antics.

Cartoonist Otto Soglow (1900-1975) was born in New York City. In his own words, his first art job was "painting forget-me-nots on baby rattles." He studied with John Sloane at the Art Students League, and sold his first drawings to pulp magazines. In the late 1920s, his social-realist drawings were appearing in such radical publications as The New Masses and The Liberator, as well as the Life and Collier's.

In 1931 he created The Little King while at The New Yorker, and three years later, the strip moved to the Sunday comics pages of King Features Syndicate. He illustrated about twenty-five books and continued drawing The Little King until his death.

Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and The Little King features 432 pages of Soglow's The Little King, plus the complete run of The Ambassador, the strip that preceded the King in the comics pages, as well as copious examples of his other artwork. Here's more from the Library of American Comics site:

The Little King is a monarch who sits stiffly on the throne but bursts into life at the sight of a hotdog stand or at the approach of a rowdy mob. He is a man of the people who has somehow found himself on the wrong side of the palace steps, but he makes the most of it, trying to do right by his office and find what pleasures he can at the absurd outer reaches of his daily rituals.

It was often said that Otto Soglow resembled his creation, and he did nothing to disabuse people of that notion as he regularly performed in character throughout his career. As is explored in this volume, the resemblance was more than merely physical: like his most famous creation, Soglow was a man whose origins and political sensibilities were always with the working man on the street—and even the angry mob.

Above: Soglow in 1933, from an animated short.

Yet while he began his career as a radical artist publishing in The New Masses and The Liberator, a decade later he was working for William Randolph Hearst and creating advertisements for Pepsi Cola and oil companies. The Little King is born out of the tension between his political idealism and his professional ambitions.

... Much of the humor in The Little King is aimed at puncturing pomposity and, as Ivan Brunetti points out in his Foreword, Soglow accomplishes it with drawings that are tightly composed, exquisitely timed, carefully structured pieces of machinery. "His process of streamlining is at the root of why his cartoons have a timeless sophistication and elegance," writes Brunetti, "and continue to entice new readers and cartoonists." ....

 
The Little King art from (top) Independent Online Booksellers Association and (middle) The Ephemerist. Video clip from Mike Lynch Cartoons.

"Label 228": unsticking the art and putting it between the pages

It was only a matter of time before Andre the Giant really did have a posse.

The black-and-white image of wrestler Andre the Giant on stickers affixed to stop-signs and telephone poles was an "experiment in phenomenology" begun in 1988 by design student Shepard Fairey, who in 2008 designed the now-famous Obama "Hope" image. Twenty years later, Fairey's original experiment has become an art form that appears virtually everywhere an artist can stick a label.

Artists that once sought gallery wall space find new media for expression, and new places to display their work; today, pop culture is the medium itself, and artists find tools in the everyday material of the marketplace. Spray can, markers, pen and ink -- these seem new and logical tools as art swings wildly from gallery to print to digital, pixel to page, and back again.

Others bypass this process all together and simply go from pole to post, creating stickable art that affixes to any surface. Label 228 (Soft Skull Press) began as camden noir's call for artists to submit their art on USPS Priority Mail stickers -- those ubiquitous rectangles with their inviting white space. Six months later, 500 items had arrived from around the world.

From the Soft Skull website: "These labels are free, portable, and quick and easy to exhibit, offering artists the chance to spend more time creating their work than if they were to paint and write directly on walls, vehicles, and public objects.”

One man's stickable art, of course, is another's graffiti; it's a toss-up if these labels by Mecro, Zoso, Kegr, Robots Will Kill! and others are permanent treasures. The disposable nature of a label suggests they're not meant to be -- the viewer's appreciation here depends on the images' inclusion in book format, away from the ephemeral encounter at street level. If the irony of this is lost on the artist, to the viewer looking through Label 228 its an irony that assumes its own art form.

Otto Soglow's "The Little King" gets the royal treatment

The Little King, 1946

The Little King would be surprised at the size of the new book dedicated to his simple cartoon antics.

Cartoonist Otto Soglow (1900-1975) was born in New York City. In his own words, his first art job was "painting forget-me-nots on baby rattles." He studied with John Sloane at the Art Students League, and sold his first drawings to pulp magazines. In the late 1920s, his social-realist drawings were appearing in such radical publications as The New Masses and The Liberator, as well as the Life and Collier's.

In 1931 he created The Little King while at The New Yorker, and three years later, the strip moved to the Sunday comics pages of King Features Syndicate. He illustrated about twenty-five books and continued drawing The Little King until his death.

Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and The Little King features 432 pages of Soglow's The Little King, plus the complete run of The Ambassador, the strip that preceded the King in the comics pages, as well as copious examples of his other artwork. Here'smore from the Library of American Comics site:

The Little King is a monarch who sits stiffly on the throne but bursts into life at the sight of a hotdog stand or at the approach of a rowdy mob. He is a man of the people who has somehow found himself on the wrong side of the palace steps, but he makes the most of it, trying to do right by his office and find what pleasures he can at the absurd outer reaches of his daily rituals.

It was often said that Otto Soglow resembled his creation, and he did nothing to disabuse people of that notion as he regularly performed in character throughout his career. As is explored in this volume, the resemblance was more than merely physical: like his most famous creation, Soglow was a man whose origins and political sensibilities were always with the working man on the street—and even the angry mob.

Above: Soglow in 1933, from an animated short.

Yet while he began his career as a radical artist publishing in The New Masses and The Liberator, a decade later he was working for William Randolph Hearst and creating advertisements for Pepsi Cola and oil companies. The Little King is born out of the tension between his political idealism and his professional ambitions.

... Much of the humor in The Little King is aimed at puncturing pomposity and, as Ivan Brunetti points out in his Foreword, Soglow accomplishes it with drawings that are tightly composed, exquisitely timed, carefully structured pieces of machinery. "His process of streamlining is at the root of why his cartoons have a timeless sophistication and elegance," writes Brunetti, "and continue to entice new readers and cartoonists." ....

The Little King art from (top) Independent Online Booksellers Association and (middle) The Ephemerist. Video clip from Mike Lynch Cartoons.

"Literary Lives" (Edward Sorel): skewering reputations with an illustrator's pen

Some claim the comics page as their first exposure to literature ("once you can read the words in the balloons, the drawings are a zillion times funnier," cartoonist Matt Groening says his brother explained to him before he could read). Edward Sorel's Literary Lives is a collection of cartoons lampooning the careers of ten writers -- in sharp, acerbic, sometimes wildly funny episodes -- andall of them are far from a Classics Comics telling of literary history. Depending on your appreciation of Yeats, Jung, and Ayn Rand (to name three whose tales appear), Sorel's pen skewers or demolishes the reputations of some of the world's prominent literary figures.

It's not surprising that the skepticism and anti-authoritarianism evident in his political cartoons surfaces in Literary Lives. He's always had a mistrust of authority, Sorel said in an interview when the book was published, in 2006. Frankly, he admits, "there may be some deep psychological need I have in tearing down people who are better artists or writers than I am." While he was creating the biographies, which originally appeared in The Nation and The Atlantic, the artist realized that "once artists or writers receive a lot of fame they seem to think of themselves as godlike, and they change a lot."

Tolstoy repents a life of dissipation at the age of 34, by Edward Sorel

This realization created a change in Sorel's approach. Tolstoy was only "just odd and kind of crazy," Sorel explained, and his first piece, on the life of Honore Balzac, turned out to be quite sad; Balzac spent much of his life trying to win the approval of his mother, and was a very sympathetic character. Not surprisingly, the Balzac biography isn't included here. Sorel told an interviewer it "wasn't funny."

After these first two installments, the artist decided to bring out the darker and more unpleasant traits of his subjects which most biographies ignore. As he put it, "avarice, duplicity, and selfishness can be amusing. Vices are amusing, and these are all writers with vices."


"They weren't all bad ... but some of the others were nasty. (Lillian) Hellman was nasty and Bertholt Brecht was one of then 10 worst people in the whole world, I'd say. And so was Carl Jung. I was not too fond of Sartre. No, they were nasty pieces of work."

The aging Yeats is shown infatuated by Maud Gonne, who turns him down; then he turns his attentions to her daughter. Norman Mailer sneaks into the hospital and suggests to his recovering wife she doesn't tell the police the truth, that he stabbed her at a party: it might hurt his New York mayoral campaign. Sorel can be gently satiric as well: he imagines Proust's hometown filled with billboards advertising madelaines and, in the Illiers-Combray town square, there's a Cafe du Temps Perdu.

There's more: During the Nazi occupation of France, where he is a successful playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre (in tuxedo) gets his cigarette lit by a German soldier. Next to Sorel's child-like script declaring A Cult Is Born, Ayn Rand holds a biblical tablet emblazened with the words Push Grab Take Keep to frenzied admirers. And, as can be expected by Sorel's distrust of idealogues, Yeats comes under fire for his admiration of Mussolini.

Carl Jung in his fantasy as an Aryan Christ, by Edward Sorel

This sort of satire lends itself to the single-panel layout of each page, as the hunan follies (and character flaws) of each artist gets the full-color Sorel treatment. Jung imagines himself as an Aryan god holding the golden-haired Brunhilde; another panel shows Jung, in 1933, suggesting to a group of psychologists that "the Jews be forced to dress differently so they are not mistaken 'for people like ourselves'."

I'll be the first to admit I can't read Ernest Hemingway -- not skewered here, but with hope there'll be more Sorel to come -- without thinking of Kurt Vonnegut's assessment of Hemingway's war novels: "He was never a soldier, and never shot a human being except, finally, himself." Exactly. Whatever a reader thinks of a writer for good or bad, casting a critical eye on the foibles of heroes is great fun in Literary Lives. It's also a hell of a lot more entertaining than the entire library of Classics Illustrated comics.

Memorial Day at Bellemeade Books

Time for one more chapter ....

Unsticking the art between the pages: "Label 228: A Street Art Project"

It was only a matter of time before Andre the Giant really did have a posse.

The black-and-white image of wrestler Andre the Giant on stickers affixed to stop-signs and telephone poles was an "experiment in phenomenology" begun in 1988 by design student Shepard Fairey, who in 2008 designed the now-famous Obama "Hope" image. Twenty years later, Fairey's original experiment has become an art form that appears virtually everywhere an artist can stick a label.

Artists that once sought gallery wall space find new media for expression, and new places to display their work; today, pop culture is the medium itself, and artists find tools in the everyday material of the marketplace. Spray can, markers, pen and ink -- these seem new and logical tools as art swings wildly from gallery to print to digital, pixel to page, and back again.

Others bypass this process all together and simply go from pole to post, creating stickable art that affixes to any surface. Label 228 (Soft Skull Press) began as camden noir's call for artists to submit their art on USPS Priority Mail stickers -- those ubiquitous rectangles with their inviting white space. Six months later, 500 items had arrived from around the world.

From the Soft Skull website: "These labels are free, portable, and quick and easy to exhibit, offering artists the chance to spend more time creating their work than if they were to paint and write directly on walls, vehicles, and public objects.”

One man's stickable art, of course, is another's graffiti; it's a toss-up if these labels by Mecro, Zoso, Kegr, Robots Will Kill! and others are permanent treasures. The disposable nature of a label suggests they're not meant to be -- the viewer's appreciation here depends on the images' inclusion in book format, away from the ephemeral encounter at street level. If the irony of this is lost on the artist, to the viewer looking through Label 228 its an irony that assumes its own art form.

Otto Soglow's "The Little King" receives his royal due in a big new anthology

The Little King, 1946

The Little King would be surprised at the size of the new book dedicated to his simple cartoon antics.

Cartoonist Otto Soglow (1900-1975) was born in New York City. In his own words, his first art job was "painting forget-me-nots on baby rattles." He studied with John Sloane at the Art Students League, and sold his first drawings to pulp magazines. In the late 1920s, his social-realist drawings were appearing in such radical publications as The New Masses and The Liberator, as well as the Life and Collier's.

In 1931 he created The Little King while at The New Yorker, and three years later, the strip moved to the Sunday comics pages of King Features Syndicate. He illustrated about twenty-five books and continued drawing The Little King until his death.

Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and The Little King features 432 pages of Soglow's The Little King, plus the complete run of The Ambassador, the strip that preceded the King in the comics pages, as well as copious examples of his other artwork. Here's more from the Library of American Comics site:

The Little King is a monarch who sits stiffly on the throne but bursts into life at the sight of a hotdog stand or at the approach of a rowdy mob. He is a man of the people who has somehow found himself on the wrong side of the palace steps, but he makes the most of it, trying to do right by his office and find what pleasures he can at the absurd outer reaches of his daily rituals.

It was often said that Otto Soglow resembled his creation, and he did nothing to disabuse people of that notion as he regularly performed in character throughout his career. As is explored in this volume, the resemblance was more than merely physical: like his most famous creation, Soglow was a man whose origins and political sensibilities were always with the working man on the street—and even the angry mob.

Above: Soglow in 1933, from an animated short.

Yet while he began his career as a radical artist publishing in The New Masses and The Liberator, a decade later he was working for William Randolph Hearst and creating advertisements for Pepsi Cola and oil companies. The Little King is born out of the tension between his political idealism and his professional ambitions.

... Much of the humor in The Little King is aimed at puncturing pomposity and, as Ivan Brunetti points out in his Foreword, Soglow accomplishes it with drawings that are tightly composed, exquisitely timed, carefully structured pieces of machinery. "His process of streamlining is at the root of why his cartoons have a timeless sophistication and elegance," writes Brunetti, "and continue to entice new readers and cartoonists." ....

The Little King art from (top) Independent Online Booksellers Association and (middle) The Ephemerist. Video clip from Mike Lynch Cartoons.

Memorial Day weekend 2008

No blog today ... just time for one more chapter.